pip basics....

[12153dad]

have hopper w/sling.....need step-by-step how to select 2 channels to "watch"....thanks

 

[Brian Fuller]

Have hopper with sling

Have at least 2 available tuners. Press the red rectangle button while watching live tv to see what your tuners are doing

On the bottom left of your controller are three little black buttons that control your picture in picture features. Pressing the pip button launches the feature and gives you the pip menu.

While in picture in picture you control the screenon the left hand side. If you want to switch to the other screen you need to press the swap button. When you are done you have to hit the pip button then close pip.



Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

 

[lazydogmot]

While watching PIP, you can change the main picture using the guide, punching in the channel numbers or use the arrow buttons. To change the other picture, if needed, swap the pictures.

 

[oldengineer]

That swap button is really neat and gives the Hopper a feature that's not discussed much that I really like. When watching a real time broadcast I like to switch to a recorded show during commercial breaks, some of which are 5+ minutes long. You can start a recorded program, even one on an EHD, push the swap button which will bring you to a tuner, use the keypad to select the live broadcast, and then using the swap button will switch between shows. EHD recordings don't show on the recall screen, at least on my Hoppers.

 

[BBCInc]

I use PiP all the time on my HWS. One 'limitation' I've found is there are only two buffers (each with up to an hour HD storage space) -- which makes sense since swap is what you use to switch between them. I mainly use it to skip commercials (spoiled by autohop I guess). Just cue up one program on the current tuner/buffer, press swap, and cue up another program. Then all you have to do is remember to pause the program when a commercial comes on before pressing swap to switch tuners. It will take a while to build up time in the buffers (but not extremely long given the amount of commercials run these days) but once you do, just use skip ahead in conjunction with swap to avoid the commercials.

This is very similar to what oldengineer describes with using PiP with recorded programs. One tip on that is that the current buffer will be zeroed out when you play a recorded program but the other buffer will still continue to fill, so when you get done watching the recording, pressing swap will get you back to the other buffer, filled with content (up to the 1 hour limit), just use the back button to position yourself to where you want to start viewing.

 

[qsoundrich]

Does the swap button still work the same as on the 622? How many pips do you get 2 or 3? Can you control the aspect ratio in side by side?

 

[DishSubLA]

Channel 103 Hopper has the Hopper Tech Chat with a good explanation of how to use PIP. That program repeats among the rotation of Hopper How To's and Welcome to HopTown.

 

[Shart]

That swap button is really neat and gives the Hopper a feature that's not discussed much that I really like. When watching a real time broadcast I like to switch to a recorded show during commercial breaks, some of which are 5+ minutes long. You can start a recorded program, even one on an EHD, push the swap button which will bring you to a tuner, use the keypad to select the live broadcast, and then using the swap button will switch between shows. EHD recordings don't show on the recall screen, at least on my Hoppers.

I discovered this same little trick the first time I tried to watch a recording in progress. I usually like to begin watching football games about 30 minutes late so I can blow thru commercials. When I left the recording and came back, I had two choices... Start at the beginning or at "live". WTF???? Swap on PIP gets past this by letting me pause the game, and then swap to another tuner and watch for a while, and then swap back and un-pause. Pretty sloppy, I'd rather it just give the 3 logical choices of go to the beginning, where I left off, or "live" after I leave a recording in progress. I'm wondering if Tivo has a patent on that because it just makes too much sense to do it that way...